How #SquadCare Saved My Life

On Instagram, #selfcare makes for good content. Users have tagged over 2.5 million posts—acai bowls, atmospheric candles, yoga mats, green juice—with the hashtag. Over 75,000 people are practicing it on #selfcaresunday, and more than 25,000 photos bear witness to the fact that #selfcarematters. And it does; marginalized populations have performed self-care for centuries in the face of systemic oppression. But the term, whether it refers to critical activist work or a kind of spiritual nourishment, suggests that it's possible to practice care on our own. The truth is we exist in matrices of allies and friends who do this work for us. If we're honest, it isn't #selfcare. It's #squadcare. This week, ELLE.com scholars at Wake Forest University go deep on just what that means. Here, Melissa Harris-Perry reflects on why it's mattered to her.

I began leaving my doors unlocked at night. Then I would prop the front door open as an invitation. I wanted to die. The blinding grief somehow convinced me that if I was visibly vulnerable, perhaps a serial killer would come along to end my misery. I was 23 and studying for a Ph.D. that left me feeling more like an imposter than a professor. The man I loved did not love me. I was in debt and could see no way out. And I was just beginning to be honest about having survived rape as a young teen. Weak from subsisting solely on Diet Coke, I crumbled under the weight of the fear of failing, crushing loneliness, and unspeakable insecurities. I was lying on the floor of my apartment when Blair walked through the door I'd left open for a yearned-for killer.

We weren't yet close friends when she put her arms around my shoulders and said firmly, "Girl, stand up. This is kind of ridiculous."

I refuse to accept that self-care is necessary for health and well-being.

I credit that moment for my rejection of the ubiquitous concept of self-care. Ask about my self-care routine, and I'll respond with a blank stare. I don't follow self-care advice or buy the products it insists on. I refuse to accept that self-care is necessary for health and well-being. What lifted me from the floor, locked the front door, helped me find a counselor, and initiated 20 years of bullshit-free friendship was not self-care—it was squad care.

Throughout the decades, Blair and I have read each other's academic papers and covered each other's short-term financial crises. I squeezed her hand as I pushed my daughter into the world and held her head during both of her C-sections. When my first marriage fell apart, Blair would not let me fall apart with it. And when a brain tumor took her beloved mother, nothing could stop me from being there when she said her final farewell. We don't see or talk to each other daily, but we practice a kind of care across those distances.

At its worst, self-care is to our current moment what granola, leg warmers, and yoga were to previous generations. Distilled into bath bombs and marketed to the consumer class, self-care can come off as a collection of hipster luxury items—a visible manifestation of excess time and resources spent massaging trigger points and pushing back cuticles. We are rarely asked about the labor conditions for those rubbing our feet. The stench of economic inequality is not exactly relaxing aromatherapy.

But at its best, there has always been a radical potential planted within the insistent focus on self-care. Black feminist theorist bell hooks planted the seed of radical self-care in her book Sisters of the Yam: Black Women and Self-Recovery, writing, "We cannot fully create effective movements for social change if individuals struggling for that change are not also self-actualized or working towards that end. When wounded individuals come together in groups to make change our collective struggle is often undermined by all that has not been dealt with emotionally." Here hooks is reminding us that meaningful, political change does not happen as a result of the forces of history. Social movements are launched and sustained by activists, but those activists are human; breakable under the weight of the burdensome work they perform. Rather than simply ask these wounded warriors to bear up under the weight of their liberation labor, we can offer them a self-care framework that would give them explicit permission to care for their own welfare, even as they work on behalf of the broader community.

The unmatched Ella Baker often motivated civil rights activists by giving them her memorable charge: "We who believe in freedom cannot rest until it comes." A collective self-care framework would adapt this claim and counter: "We who work for freedom must take an occasional nap to ensure we survive to see freedom come." This kind of self-care charts a more feasible, humane pace for activists, but still comes back to the idea that self-care consists of what you can do for you.

We rely on others to care for us when we are too young, too old, too ill, too broken, too sad, too scared, too needy, too overwhelmed, or too incapable.

But whether it's through selling bath soaps or encouraging activists to take mental health breaks, celebrating individual self-reliance elides the fact that ultimately care is not something we do for ourselves. We rely on others to care for us when we are too young, too old, too ill, too broken, too sad, too scared, too needy, too overwhelmed, or too incapable. Care is why we live in community, why we form families, and ultimately, why we form government.

Ultimately, self-care encourages women to rely solely on themselves rather than to make demands on anyone or anything else. Self-care validates as good and noble all of those women with sufficient resources to "take a break" from the hustle and bustle while it censures those who seek relief from the collective care of the state—through child care subsidies, food assistance, low-income or subsidized housing, or health care. In so much of our political language, the black, brown, and poor women who seek care in these ways are still represented as bad, fraudulent, lazy, and wasteful.

And so instead, we turn to squad care, a way of understanding our needs as humans that acknowledges how we lean on one another, that we are not alone in the world, but rather enmeshed in webs of mutual and symbiotic relationships. Sometimes our squads are small, intimate, and bonded by affection, like the bestie squad Blair and I have shared for decades. Sometimes our squad is enormous, impersonal, and bonded by geographic and historic identity. As Americans, our national squad care is most obvious in moments of natural disaster or through public policies like social security.

Squad care reminds us there is no shame in reaching for each other and insists the imperative rests not with the individual, but with the community. Our job is to have each other's back.

What is my self-care routine? I don't have one. But I do my best to keep my squad in good shape. As a teacher and mentor, I have worked to develop a squad care ethic with my students by creating experiences that allow them to learn from and rely on one another. For the past 10 months, five undergraduate students participated in the ELLE.com Scholars program—a journalism program at Wake Forest University in partnership with this site. Together, these dynamic young women traveled, researched, and produced extraordinary media content. And they became a squad, counting on one another in good and tough times as they developed leadership skills and professional capacities beyond anything we imagined at the start. What follows is an examination on how squad care operates in not only their lives, but the lives of young women they admire nationwide.

We give you #SquadCare.

Melissa Harris-PerryAs editor-at-large, Melissa Harris-Perry acts as a guide to the stories, experiences, challenges, policies, and defining pop culture moments of women and girls of color.

A Part of Hearst Digital Media
ELLE participates in various affiliate marketing programs, which means we may get paid commissions on editorially chosen products purchased through our links to retailer sites.